The massive hacking of a big bank puts 100 million customers in danger

The alleged thief, Paige Thompson, a former US software engineer from a Seattle-based company, 33, was arrested by the Federal Police (FBI) after showing the flight on the site GitHub.

Capital One, the fifth largest issuer of bank credit cards in the United States, said in a statement that it had been determined that a foreigner had unauthorized access to his network and that he was not allowed. he had personal information from those who had applied for credit card products or wanted to get credit cards.

Capital One.jpg

About 100 million US citizens and nearly six million Canadians were affected, said the firm, who said "that no credit card account number or information was stolen for connect to bank accounts "and that" 99% of social security numbers have not been compromised. "

The information obtained illegally belongs to individuals and small businesses that contacted Capital One between 2005 and the beginning of 2019. They range from names, addresses, postal codes, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, birthdays to reported earnings.

The alleged hacker, who took advantage of a failure of a Capital One cloud server, also obtained partial information about credit card holders, such as the payment history, the current balance and the means of credit. contact them.

"It is unlikely that the stolen information was used to commit fraud or was disseminated," said Capital One, who had promised to continue the investigations.

The financial entity said the data theft had occurred between March 12 and July 17 this year and that it had ended the intrusion on July 19, two days after having been alerted by a user of the GitHub website.